In episode 23 we talk with David Mimno of Cornell University about his work in the digital humanities (and explore what machine learning can tell us about lady zombie ghosts and huge bodies of literature) Ryan introduces us to probabilistic programming and we take a listener question about knowledge transfer between math and machine learning. Listen to podcast here.
A number of problems in digital history/humanities require one to calculate the similarity of documents or to identify how one text borrows from another. To give one example, the Viral Texts project, by Ryan Cordell, David Smith, et al., has been very successful at identifying reprinted articles in American newspapers. Kellen Funk and I have […]
Today, a number of companies are investing heavily in AR and beginning to deploy consumer-facing devices and applications. These systems have the potential to deliver enormous value, including to populations with limited physical or other resources. Applications include hands-free instruction and training, language translation, obstacle avoidance, advertising, gaming, museum tours, and much more. This whitepaper—which […]
As the only historian in my immediate family, I’m responsible for our genealogy, saved in a massive GEDCOM file. Through the wonders of the web, I now manage quite the sprawling tree: over 100,000 people, hundreds of photos, thousands of census records & historical documents. The majority came from distant relations managing their own trees, with whom I share. Such […]
Recent developments in emulation frameworks make it possible to deliver emulations to readers via the Web in ways that make them appear as normal components of Web pages. This removes what was the major barrier to deployment of emulation as a preservation strategy. Barriers remain, the two most important are that the tools for creating […]
From their earliest incarnations in the seventeenth-century, through their Georgian expansion into provincial and colonial markets and culminating in their late-Victorian transformation into New Journalism, British newspapers have relied upon scissors-and-paste journalism to meet consumer demands for the latest political intelligence and diverting content. However, mass digitisation of these periodicals, in both photographic and machine-readable form, […]
Recent advances in vector-space representations of vocabularies have created an extremely interesting set of opportunities for digital humanists. These models, known collectively as word embedding models, may hold nearly as many possibilities for digital humanitists modeling texts as do topic models. Yet although they’re gaining some headway, they remain far less used than other methods […]
Critics did not love 2004 film The Libertine, starring Johnny Depp as dissolute 17th century poet and court favorite John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester. Some admiring critics pointed out, dour scripting aside, the film’s depiction of 17th century London is indeed most convincing. You can almost feel the muck that clings to everything, […]
Last month, together with Silvia Stoyanova, I delivered a lecture at the “Methodological Intersections”: Trier Digital Humanities Autumn School 2015 (which Silvia co-organised) on the topic of ‘The Multidimensional Scholarly Archive’. Silvia’s part of the lecture has been posted here, underneath you can find my contribution. I would like to focus on some of the […]
This is the first post in Data Praxis, a new series edited by Thomas Padilla. Data Praxis highlights a range of perspectives on the practice of digitally inflected research, pedagogy, curation, and collection building and augmentation. Topics span methods and tools in the context of research questions and/or exploratory trajectories, and extend to consider reflections on […]
